Sunday, June 11, 2017

How to Tweet

I was a reluctant convert to social media. Ten years ago, I
didn’t see the point of it. I didn’t have facebook, twitter, Instagram, a blog,
or a youtube channel. Now I have all of these and am quite active on several. I
will first outline my social media development as a background for the advice I
will then suggest about social media for scientists. This advice needs to be
tempered by the fact that I am not a social media icon – nor that I am
especially good at it. However, I have found it very useful professionally, and
often entertaining personally. (My instagram and flickr accounts are used for showing nature photos I have taken over the years, and so are not really discussed here.)

The transition started about eight years ago when my newer
students convinced me that a blog would be a good idea as it was an
increasingly common way for people to get scientific information. I started the blog but, at first, just kind of did it lip service without much effort and resented
the need to have to generate content on a regular basis. But then people
started reading and responding to some of my posts and their value became
clear. Then, a few years ago, I started a series of “How To” posts that
provided advice for young scientists. This series became surprisingly popular (see the table below) and useful to people to the point that I have numerous people come up to me at
meetings to say they follow my blog and find it helpful. It was even featured
twice in Nature magazine.

A couple of years into this blogging adventure, it became
clear that twitter was a great way to promote the blog – and so I signed on in March 2014. Again, I didn’t really pay much attention at first but, as time went on, I
realized its usefulness at both send and receiving information and quickly
gained a reasonable number of followers. I don’t have any viral tweets – not
that I seek them – but several have been retweeted more than 1000 times (an example is below). My
favorite current use of twitter is to promote my book through a fun #PeopleWhoFellAsleepReadingMyBook
thread, storified here.

At about the same time as I started on twitter, I initiated
a YouTube channel. The goal was not to be a famed “youtuber” but rather to
simply share some of my wildlife and nature videos, mostly with family and
friends but also with colleagues and with students in my classes. I then added
a number of teaching-oriented videos, especially the drunkard’s walk, and some personal
climbing parody videos. (In retrospect, it would have been better to keep the
professional and personal youtube channels separate.) Again, I am very
surprised by how many times some of these quick productions have been viewed,
such as those shown below.

In short, social media has become an integral part of my
professional life and I think it is a great way to provide information and
advice to a much broader range of people than otherwise possible. Hence, my
goal in the rest of this post is to make a case for the value of social media
for scientists and to provide some suggestions on how to engage, with some of
these suggestions being different from those you might hear elsewhere.

Why use social media?

1. A lot of scientists not on social media think it is a
triviality for which they “do not have time.” I don’t agree with this
proposition; indeed, I am sure I don’t have any more time than they do. The
reason I disagree is that, for me, social media has simply replaced other
time-wasting activities. When working on my computer, I get bored just like
anyone else and I used to procrastinate by going to cnn or espn or cbc or whatever
other traditional media sites. Now, I simply replace most of that
procrastination time by looking at twitter or instagram, which is much more useful
as it is related to my work.

2. Some scientists are of the opinion that social media is just
filled with a bunch of uninteresting stuff that will swamp them with nonsense. This
proposition is certainly true if you aren’t careful and selective. However, the
great benefit of social media is just the opposite – you can tailor your own
news feed, making it much more targeted and useful to you than more traditional
forms of media. For instance, I follow colleagues, students, journals,
universities, departments, and so on. If the information I am getting isn’t
useful, I simply unfollow that person. Indeed, I how have my twitter feed
whittled down to a great set of complementary news sources.

3. Social media is a good way to get scientific information. If
you tailor your feed appropriately, you can get lots of pointers to good new
papers that are coming out that you wouldn’t otherwise see. In the old days,
you could pretty much cover ALL the relevant literature by just skimming the
contents of a dozen or so journals. Now there is an order of magnitude more
science out there, making it impossible to find everything – but the right feed
can reveal to you some of the best stuff coming out now.

4. Social media helps you reach a broader audience – and,
hence, better promote your work and ideas. As just noted above, it is
impossible to keep up with all the publications of others. For the same reason,
your own papers are likely to be lost under in the avalanche of information
that is out there. It is not enough to simply publish your work any more – you
need to promote it. Social media is one way to do so as students and colleagues
in your field will often follow you and see your posts.

How to use social media?

The following suggestions are based on my experiences over
the past five years or so. Again, these are just my opinions, with which others
will not necessarily agree. I tend to refer mostly to twitter below, but the
same basic points apply to other platforms such as facebook, instragram,
blogging, youtube, and so on. I also image they will be most useful to people
who have not already “found their own way” on social media – but perhaps a few
will be interesting even to experienced folks.

1. Be selective in who you follow. Some people will argue that
the “contract” of social media is to follow back – that is, when someone
follows you, you immediately reciprocate. However, this approach doesn’t work
for me. To not be overwhelmed, and to be sure to see the stuff I want to see, I
keep the number of accounts I follow to a manageable number – about 100 on
twitter. The alternative is to follow more but “mute” them. However, the muting
strategy seems to me rather dishonest. If I follow you, then I don’t mute you.

2. Be selective in what you tweet. Analyses have been done
about how often one should tweet/post. I don’t know the details of those
analyses but I am sure that they all say that too-frequent posting is not
beneficial. Instead, retweet/post those things that are truly interesting and
that you think would be interesting to your followers.

3. Re-tweet interesting posts from diverse people and feeds.
Although I don’t follow everyone that follows me, I do periodically check out
the feeds of my followers to find interesting posts of theirs to re-tweet. I
think this help can be especially helpful to graduate students who don’t yet
have a large following on social media.

4. Add a visual. Almost every one of my tweets includes an
image of some sort. Images are much more likely to catch the eye of someone who
is skimming quickly and thus inspire them to stop and actually read it. This
comes partly from personal experience – I generally don’t pay attention to
tweets that are text only. This isn’t a philosophy or anything – it is just the
practicality of not having time to read everything and, while a tweet is only
140 characters, a picture is worth 1000 words!

5. Acknowledge, either by tagging or through a link, the source
of the material – especially images – that you put on social media. And, along
the same lines, don’t retweet people who don’t acknowledge their sources. For
example, many of the aggregating feeds that post cool pictures don’t credit the
original photographer. Don’t retweet them.

6. Be apolitical, at least usually, unless your goal is to be
political in your professional life. I subscribe to the perspective that
scientists should be as objective as possible if we are to maintain our
credibility as experts. Many social media users, by contrast, spend tons of
time criticizing universities, journals, funding agencies, colleagues,
conference organizers, etc. I have no use or time for these diatribes. (Of
course, I do retweet the occasional well-thought out or funny piece about idiotic
and dangerous demagogues.)

7. Don’t troll/shame people – unless you want to be known as a
troll. Sure, trolls tend to get the most followers, reminding of me of when
David Houle wrote in a book review that “Negative reviews often give a frisson of pleasure to the reader.” In my opinion, however, negative comments
reflect more on the commenter than the commentee. Instead, generate occasional and
thoughtful positive criticism that helps move things forward in a constructive
way.

8. Don’t blindly retweet everything you see about
social/scientific equality. For instance, many white male profs seem to retweet
everything they see about the disadvantages facing women and people of color.
Those disadvantages are real, and need our recognition. However, the more
someone not in those categories tweets about them, the less sincere that person
seems - at least to me. Instead, periodically retweet THE BEST posts about social/scientific
equality. Your sincerity and credibility will, I think, benefit from it. Here is
the blog post I wrote about my own “Subtle Sexism Self-Evaluation.”

If you goal is to be a scientist, then tweeting will not do
the job for you. You need to publish your own research, which you can then
supplement and promote with social media. A social media profile will not
replace a real research portfolio – only enhance it. Of course, if your goal is
to forge a career in science communication, then social media would take on
greater importance.

Yikes, I (red dot) appear to be close to being a scientific Kardashian! Original paper here.